AmigaOS 3.9
Another more recent version of a historical (and certainly prominant) OS, AmigaOS. From behind the doors of Commodore came this OS to power the successor to the C64 range, running on 7MHz of pure Motorola 68000 grunt, give or take a couple of KHz. The same series of chips were used in the Ataris, Apple Macs and the Sega Mega Drive (Genesis) at the time, the fight was on. Years passed, though and eventually Commodore fell apart, but development on AmigaOS still continued beyond their final AmigaOS 3.1 release with AmigaOS 3.5 and up under licence from those who had obtained the Amiga trademark. Here we have AmiagOS 3.9, the final pure 68k compatible version (68020+), installed on an eee under WinUAE and running rather smoothly indeed. Again, I expected the screen resolution to cause a problem but with a little tweaking it handled it no problem. Still feels just like it used to, but a little more up to date (AmigaOS 3.1 began to feel very outdated, no TCP/IP stack or support for modern peripherals). As snappy as AmigaOS ever was natively, everything I’d expect seems to be supported from disk access through to sound and even internet access works too, providing you have appropriate software in AmigaOS. The screen, after configuration, looks clear and still fairly high resolution at 724×460 (from a total 724×512 with 256 colours) plus borders to pad it to the eee’s 800×480. Sounds poor, but it’s not bad at all when you’re using it, especially when you bear in mind that the Amiga wasn’t terribly high resolution anyway in comparison to today’s monitors. The great thing with emulating old systems is that even with my eee’s relatively pathetic 512MB RAM I can pretty much max out these old emulated systems as far as they could posssibly support and still have bags of RAM left for myself, so here I’ve given it 8MB chip RAM, 128MB fast RAM. Not that it ever needed that much RAM, mind you, it screams even on mere KBs (3.1 has no complaints with 1MB, even 512KB). Maybe these OSs are outdated, but even emulated on a sub-1GHz budget CPU AmigaOS still waves the same old speed freak flag, so give it a go even just once.
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Acorn RISCOS 4.0
Next up, a favourite of mine, RISCOS 4.0. Better than 3.x and moderately more recent, this old OS runs on ARM-based Acorn machines. Popular in UK schools during the 90s, these machines had a decent catalogue of software available to them and models varied from everything-in-the-keyboard style machines such as the A3000 to big ol’ desktops like the A7000 which looked and were generally spec’d to be a little more gutsy. This copy of RISCOS 4.0 is running in VirtualRPC which emulates an Acorn RiscPC.
I did expect the screen resolution to cause an issue but no, it didn’t mind a bit. Had to manually edit a configuration file but it didn’t take a moment to add the 800×480 resolution. Once that was done, it felt practically native. Speed is good, and everything works just as it should.
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Apple OSX Leopard
Let’s start off slow, something new and reasonably mundane. OSX Leopard has been installed on numerous netbooks to date, it’s a popular choice now that it’s possible to install OSX on non-Apple machines without an emulator. Here’s a picture:
I’ll keep it brief, if you’ve owned or used a Mac in the last few years, you’ve probably used OSX, it’s pretty much the same only with a lower resolution. Currently the power and wifi don’t really work but we’ll call that work in progress. Graphics, audio, ethernet and all the other important stuff seems to work just grand. Installed on an 8GB SD card with very little space to spare, but a 16GB card would hold it just perfectly. Runs very well for the spec of the eee and despite the occasional bottomless dialogue boxes on the low resolution screen it’s surprisingly usable.
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Alternateeev
So here I am, a fan of netbooks and an owner of an eeepc and a fan of old and unusual operating systems both native and emulated and the time has come to combine the two. How many different OSs can I install and configure to work well with the eee? Join me as I find out…
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